An advice columnist took a letter a few weeks ago from someone who wished that overweight people would wear clothing that fit better-and there was a follow-up on today’s column. It’s the comments at the end of her column that are so interesting. There are a lot of people talking about the class nature of food, healthy and unhealthy. And there are some awesome examples of privilege, too, which are perfect illustrations for everything Jenn and Maria says.

Here’s a review of Shrek 4. Haven’t seen it yet, but am wondering if there’s a way to argue that part of what’s going on with my girl Fiona is that the same skills, passions, and concerns that led her to being a kick ass ogre mama led her to being a kick ass revolutionary. If so, I wonder if that’s at all transgressive.

Wow, the “good deed” story is great. And here I just helped an old man stand up again and walked him home while he was drunkenly spouting racist shit (“Only a German would have helped me, the others would have walked by”) in between thanking me and talking about his new hip (yeah, shit-faced, 70, and a new hip :))

Frankly, Ms. Fakih winning is the first thing in my life to make me think beauty pageants might *not* be complete pits of fail. I mean, I’m still not exactly thrilled about the concept, but at least they’re getting away from the Wholesome White Christian Girl model of pageant queens.

I am still trying to figure out why the first SATC movie was made, let alone a sequel.

ETA: I’m like the queen of unfinished thoughts this week. I meant to also say that judging from the ads for SATC2, I knew the hijinks the four central characters got in on their “desert oasis holiday” were bound to be horribly offensive. And it’s pretty damned sad that that conclusion, so easily jumped to, was pretty accurate.

Re: Sarah Palin. Faludi needs to write another book. She mentions in an update to newer Backlash editions that the backlash transmuted into a co-opting & twisting of feminist language and ideal, 1984-style (love is hate, hate is love – anti-woman is positive feminism, natch). The topic is worthy of a whole book, IMO.

Huh. I don’t know what to make of the fat teens + sex study. They seem to hate it, but they also seem to agree with it, and it’s 180 degrees contradictory to my own experience. I’m confused.

SATC2… OMG that sounds SO OFFENSIVE. And the commenters sound ignorant as hell. One of them compares this movie to Legally Blond, but Legally Blond is a morality story about a naive character exploring the ACTUAL virtues of feminism. Far from perfect, but at least it doesn’t confuse imperialism with liberation.

Hmm, thoughts on “crazy” as an ableist term. I’ve read some discussion on this before – not everyone agrees on just which usages are acceptable, if any – and had to go to the dictionary to see how we got to this point. The original meaning was apparently:

Full of cracks, frail, about to fall to pieces.

As in a vase. It’s related to the word “crack” and:

English speakers were using pot in reference to the skull at least by the 15th century. The metaphor of a cracked pot referring to someone who is out of their mind started sometimes later, beginning with cracked brain and ending up simply as cracked in modern English.

If I’m reading this right, it means “crazy” has always been a sort of slang that compares human beings to pottery. Understandably insulting.

I would tend to think it’s more acceptable to refer to a weekend as “crazy”, but I’ve never had the sense people associate a “crazy weekend” with a mentally ill person. Which may be a privilege issue on my part: while I was chronically depressed with anxiety issues for 30+ years, I don’t know where I fall on the mental health privilege ladder with that.

The article on teen sex and obesity, and the comments that follow it, are fantastic. I love the fact that we can poke holes is a ludicrous “scientific” study before it’s even available to the general public. Yay, Internet!

Grammar nerd nitpick — The acrobat exposed 12 women to HIV, not with HIV. The latter sounds like he outed people who were trying to hide it rather than endangering their health himself without their knowledge.

I much prefer the more polished version of Selu’s essay on Jacob Black. It makes some really interesting points about exoticization, even to someone (me) who hasn’t read the books and only saw the first movie once.

The Goth article is far to long to read during my break at work, but the abstract sounds good enough to go back to later.

found this link the other day from a cartoon I watched as a kid called ‘captain planet and the planeteers’.
This is the first episode and it particularly RELEVANT i.e. oil pipeline spilling out oil into the sea. I realise it was practically an anti-capitalist cartoon, tho loads of people take the piss out of its earnest tone and dodgy mullets on youtube. Gaia rocks though. haha